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Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

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Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#251

Post by mawildoer »

stephen_g wrote: post #236
michaelt wrote: post #6

Very nice! The state of electronics tooling has long been extremely bad - 99% of people who put a regulator into their schematic will want an appropriate input and output capacitor as the datasheet demands. 99% of people who put a microcontroller will want a crystal and a programming port and a reset pin pull-up. It's only because of closed source tools stuck in the stone age that the state of the art is to copy out…

As an electronic design engineer, it just feels to me like these kind of things aren't really huge problems day-to-day... In terms of decoupling designs etc., the reason nobody has come up with a better solution is firstly that it doesn't actually take up enough time in the scheme of things to bother, and secondly that you often have to deviate. For variable regulators for example, the output capacitor (and inductor…

We have some plans and atopile already supports some configuration regarding those deviations. There's a component selector which can choose resistors, caps, inductors etc... from a database of known components. Currently it's a free-for-all, but naturally we expect to be able to constrain this to a subset of components like "thing we already use at this company". That database means (once equations are also in) we'll be able to capture those requirements and change those output components depending on the scenario.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#252

Post by Timot05 »

tcherasaro wrote: post #246
Timot05 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing this blog post! Super cool to see how things were done early in the industry! Counterintuitively, I do agree with your points. We didn't end up designing the ato language because we actively wanted to end up there but rather because we tried everything else before and none of the solutions we tried worked out. The problem we wanted to solve was: "how does git look like in hardware?". Another way to…

Hi, @Timot05. I’m a former EE with 20 yrs experience working in the industry and have designed dozens of very large complex mixed signal PCBAs 4-32 layers, as well as about the same number of large FPGA SoC designs. I watched the demo video out of curiosity and here’s my 2 cents, though there is a lot to unpack here: First if you want to know the current state of “how does git look like in hardware” as far as PCBA de…

Thanks for your detailed answer! Tons of information in there.

To your point about how the work gets divided, I don't think that work will necessarily be distributed amongst many people for a given design but code gives you a couple of benefits:

- you can branch and merge the changes you make, which means that you can design a given feature and have your team review only this change instead of reviewing a batch of changes.

- If someone actually does want to pickup your design and wants to contribute to it, code makes it easier for them because more information is captured in the code, so they get a better sense of what the design requirements are.

To your last point, we don't really see the code becoming the documentation of the implementation of the module. Actually the goal is to do something similar to the IC space or the software space, where the code becomes the implementation of something but the documentation lives somewhere else, perhaps in a datasheet-like document. Currently the schematic forces you to have both the documentation and the implementation baked into the same document, which forces you to find a middle ground between adding information relevant to those two objectives.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#254

Post by assimpleaspossi »

>Could you imagine the pain of building an entire software product using only assembly code? That’s about how we felt designing hardware.

I've done both. What you called "pain" I called "fun". I started life as an electronic engineer but am now a software engineer and was very comfortable in both areas--including building from the TTL level. So I'm automatically suspicious of anything that calls such things painful.

My kneejerk reaction is "you've never done this professionally" but it's 3am where I'm at and can't watch the video right now.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#255

Post by peter_retief »

Great concept, I have used KICAD to design in the past, some of the problems I have had as an amateur are: 1) Selecting the right components, are they available, standard size, surface mount or leaded? 2) Single or double side? Vias can be used to hop tracks

I will try out your sw and give feedback.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#256

Post by lelanthran »

moffkalast wrote: post #126
michaelt wrote: post #6

Very nice! The state of electronics tooling has long been extremely bad - 99% of people who put a regulator into their schematic will want an appropriate input and output capacitor as the datasheet demands. 99% of people who put a microcontroller will want a crystal and a programming port and a reset pin pull-up. It's only because of closed source tools stuck in the stone age that the state of the art is to copy out…

Yeah, trying to learn KiCad is worse than learning Blender. If JLCPcb made a simple online editor that sourced from available parts and integrated directly with their store they'd be running out of banks to put their money into.

> Yeah, trying to learn KiCad is worse than learning Blender.

I dunno. I've used others, and KiCad was no harder to start with than the others (Horizon, LibrePCB, Lepton/gEDA, some others I forgot).

I asked for recommendations a week ago on HN for EDA products, and tried them all.

You know which one I eventually settled on? The one with the most components (symbols + footprints).

Turns out, features are nice (rules checker, etc) but not having to f*&^ing create my own symbols for a mass-produced part, then design the footprint for the same part is a huge timesaver.[1]

For many of us non-professionals designing a board, the UI just isn't as big of an issue as having to create our own components.

[1] At any reasonable hourly rate, having to create a library of just 1 component costs more than whatever you think you'll save with a slicker UI.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#257

Post by jmgao »

nerpderp82 wrote: post #108
calvinmorrison wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

look at OpenSCAD, it's a scripting language to generate models. I used this a lot to generate subpieces and build off of that. easy as saying Bolt("M5", 1.5) or something

As a regular OpenSCAD user, I wouldn't bring it up as a good solution for anything. It exists, you can solve problems with it, but it isn't a good design. It should just be a library in a real language.

I've found CadQuery to be a pretty good replacement for my purposes, but I haven't done anything complicated with it yet, just designing 3D printed/laser cut electronics enclosures.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#258

Post by moffkalast »

drunkonvinyl wrote: post #214
moffkalast wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, trying to learn KiCad is worse than learning Blender. If JLCPcb made a simple online editor that sourced from available parts and integrated directly with their store they'd be running out of banks to put their money into.

this resonates. i will share that i'm trying out and having luck with flux.ai. it's not perfect, but for a small hobby project and someone with little experience and not getting far quickly in kicad, it works. i have a pcb in-hand from jlcpcb right now and it works. it also introduces some of the shared features discussed above. (i don't work for them, just looking for something that would let me do a fairly fast PoC…

Oh now this one is interesting, I've given it a short try and the UX is just on another level compared to the usual, I might actually be able to get something done with it. This is what EasyEDA should've been, not the terrible KiCad web clone that it is.

For us hobbyists there's no point in investing years learning something proper like Altium because we won't ever be shipping to production or doing stupidly complex multilayer boards. We need the Tinkercad for PCBs, not Fusion360. Something that can be crude and oversimplified, but quick to use and also simple enough that even middle schoolers can learn it.

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